


I'll Still Destroy You

by Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Dark, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/M, Fade Sex, Hate Sex, Homicidal Ideation, I Repeat This is Dark, Lavellan Is Literally Trying to Kill Him, Lots of Attempted Murder, Post-Canon, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition - Trespasser DLC, Self-Destruction, Sex As a Strategy, Solas' Thirst Is His Achilles Heel, Strangulation, Suicidal Ideation, Suicidal Thoughts, The Grimmest Set of Possibilities Post-Trespasser, mutually assured destruction, they both think they're right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:28:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29704059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard/pseuds/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard
Summary: They are not in love.
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas, Fen'Harel | Solas/Female Lavellan, Fen’Harel | Solas/Female Inquisitor
Comments: 12
Kudos: 55





	I'll Still Destroy You

**Author's Note:**

> I implore you to read the tags before you decide to read further. This is much darker than my usual work. It's been a long pandemic. 
> 
> My best guess after Trespasser, Tevinter Nights, and the trolling of the game devs is that Solas thinks that he, the Inquisitor, and a good chunk of the world are doomed because of things that have already happened when we run into him in Trespasser. And while he will not let the Inquisitor help him, he wants to take down the Veil to save at least the elves from whatever he knows is coming. In that case, my plucky Inquisitor Lavellan is going to try to find a way to help him AND save him. 
> 
> But there's another way to read what he's saying. You can also read him to say that he is going to take down the Veil and THAT will kill himself, the Inquisitor, and a bunch of other people who don't have to die, and he's making that choice because he thinks the world will be better when he's done. In which case--fuck him. 
> 
> This is written around the second possibility.

_Put your heels against the wall_

_I swear you've grown a little bit taller since I saw you_

_I'll still destroy you_

_-_ The National

***

They are not in love. 

Even when his face was between her sweat-slick thighs or her body was rigid in ecstasy beneath him, he did not mistake that for love. There were things she wanted from him. There were things he wanted from her. They have separately stepped across all of the lines they might have preferred not to cross in order to achieve their ends, only to reach this impasse: the Fade is another battleground, sex another weapon. 

Some of his agents saw romance in it. A third of them once worked for the Inquisition, and those third have told the rest her story. However at cross-purposes the agents of Fen’Harel and the Inquisition were and would be, his people liked the story of the Dalish elf who saved Thedas. They liked the idea that they were not allowed to kill the Inquisitor--or at least they liked that idea before she began a series of counterattacks against his Antivan forces. They liked being warned against engaging her in the Fade or the Crossroads. 

There was a symmetry to it: him and her. Their leader was not so frightening if he must be concerned about one mortal elf opposing him in both his natural domain and the chessboard of the coming war. Solas wrote that playbook; he taught it to her. He was not surprised that she was trying to use it against him. 

He knows how this goes. He knows how this story will end. 

The Inquisitor was their greatest threat, he warned his people, but most did not believe him. 

She looks fragile: willowy and not tall. Her long, dark hair throws her pale skin into contrast and leaks purple shadows across her face and neck. Bruises on her skin are purple too until she passes her small, delicate hands across her own body and heals it with her magic. The image of a tragic heroine, from a certain perspective. 

The fragility was deceptive. Solas has never underestimated her, and he is still alive because of it. He respects her. He knows her. On some level, he is wise enough to fear her. But no, he does not love her. 

She might kill him before his work is done. If anyone can, it will be her. 

The first time he entered her dream after revealing his plans, she threw a rock at his head. 

In her dreams, she looked like a person he never knew: a Dalish First in silk robes, loose hair and blue vallaslin framing dark eyes. Two slim white hands, unstained by his magic and the blood he has caused her to shed. 

She reclined near a waterfall, feet resting in the shallows, skipping pebbles across the surface. Large birch trees shaded the pool, their leaves golden and dropping in the late fall. When the leaves crunched under his armored boots, she turned on him before he realized that she could see him. 

Her attack was very nearly successful for being crude and uncharacteristic. He caused the rock to vanish only a fraction of a second before it struck him, and it might have killed him if he’d been only slightly slower to react. Not that he admitted it to her.

“Did you think that you could kill me with a _rock?_ ” he demanded. If he died while bodily in the Fade, he might die permanently. He preferred not to test that theory, and he did not highlight that vulnerability, for obvious reasons. 

She had been in shock the last time he saw her. Dying from the Anchor’s greed for her magic, injured from her fight with the Qunari lyrium puppet, disoriented from reckoning with the revelations of her people’s past as intersected with his own. She had done some thinking since then, and her great dark eyes were alight with a hundred different emotions when she focused on him. The Inquisitor’s shoulders heaved violently, and his stomach went leaden with the thought that she might cry. He had not ever seen her cry, but he thought for a moment that she might. 

But the expression vanished, replaced by the twist of fire and ice that he was familiar with. 

“It was worth a try,” she said, her diction precise.

His eyes narrowed. So this is how it is to be, he thought. 

He resolved to exercise more caution when observing her dreams. He could not leave her to her own devices: she knew him better than most creatures who sought his end, and she had been transparent about her intention to work against him. So he sought to tread lightly in her dreams. He warned the other Dreamers in his employ away from her, and they thought that was romantic too. They would be surprised to learn of the dangers that one half-trained Dalish mage could create in the Fade. 

His agents would be surprised by many things about the Inquisitior, but first and foremost by how many of her dreams were about fucking him. Most people would sooner imagine lying down with the Void itself than the Dread Wolf. Solas knew it was bait for the trap, but who was better at recognizing traps than the Great Betrayer? There was no comfort in taking the bait and avoiding the snare, but there was a great deal of satisfaction in it. And his satisfaction was the warmest sensation he allowed himself in that last year of their lives. 

It started not two minutes after her first attempt to murder him. The Inquisitor put her feet back into the pool and began to disrobe. The golden fall afternoon of her dream was overwhelming in its strength; he should have left her, but he stood there watching as she bared pale skin and waded into the shallows.

“Come join me,” she called, her eyes hooded.

Solas intended the noise he made to serve as rejection. She did not take it that way. The attempted seduction was as crude as the attempted murder--effective mostly for being unexpected. 

He’d never seen her naked before. 

“Planning to drown me in the deep water?” he asked. “I am taller than you. And a capable swimmer.” 

She gave the thought due consideration, discarding it over the logistics. “I could tear out your jugular with my teeth,” she suggested.

The thought that she might try made him hard under his armor. 

“I would not leave you in a position to attempt it,” he replied, revealing that he was considering it. 

Her lips curled. “You’ll risk it, then.”

His chest expanded against the constraint of his breastplate. Nobody ever spoke to him with such familiarity, even if it was laden with contempt. “You think you can trick me?” he told her with all the disdain of his people. “Your Inquisition sheltered the Dread Wolf himself, and you never knew it.” He knew that she was as angry at herself for failing to see what was right in front of her as she was at him for what he’d done. It was always easier to blame yourself, Solas knew from experience. You could control yourself. Tell yourself you’d do better the next time and hope that was true. 

“I know you wanted me,” the Inquisitor said, and her eyes were as bright and dangerous as molten iron. “And you didn’t have me, because you didn’t want to _lie_.” The last word was the second weapon she threw at him.

He frowned at her. Water fell in rivulets over her breasts as she bobbed to her knees and then stood again. He couldn’t look away. 

“Well, now I know,” the Inquisitor said, expression grimly satisfied. She thought she had caught him in a kind of an untruth. His entire life was an untruth. His place in hers was a falsehood. 

His hand went unbidden to the catches of his armor. She knew nothing. Understood nothing. 

He joined her into the water. Rings radiated from their separate movements, disturbing the surface until they met and dissipated from the opposing waves.

Even in the chill of the autumn water, her skin was warm when he touched it. Soft and fragrant as the skin of a summer fruit. 

“You should let me remove the brand here,” Solas told her regretfully, brushing a fingertip along the branches of Mythal’s vallaslin where it was carved into her face. He would not have to see it, at least. 

“I _should_ throw myself off a cliff rather than let you touch me,” she said with equal solicitude. 

He shook his head. “What would that change, except this moment?” he asked, leaning down to catch her unmarred chin in his hand and thrust his tongue between her lips. 

That first time only, she tried not to come. She wanted to make him into a particular kind of monster, the kind who panted into her hair and took what he needed. He’d taken so much else from her, why would this be any different? 

He wasn’t sure she’d ever lain with a man before, which made him monstrous enough, but when he had her pressed into the side of the pool, hands grasping for purchase in the clay of the bank, he wrapped an arm around her waist and splayed his hand at the place they were joined. He ripped an unwilling orgasm from her tender flesh as she shuddered beneath him. 

And then he took her, like her Keeper had always warned her. The Nightmare had been right: his pride would be his end. 

* * *

There are clues, sometimes, to where she is and what she is doing. He will recognize the trees in the forests where he finds her or the shape of the windows in the rooms where she sleeps. When she treated with Tevinter magisters, she wore dresses of a particular cut. When he ran his tongue against the grooves that her armor cut into her stomach, he discerned that she prepared to lead her forces into battle. There were still tiny things to learn about her. 

“How do you always find me?” she asked him. Sometimes he found her in a dream where their bodies were already tangled and warped against each other, but sometimes her dream was a quiet one, a memory of a life he had not yet destroyed. Either way, he still found her. 

He could tell her that the Dread Wolf always had her scent. But he was generous. He was always generous with her: her pleasure, her remaining life, a few crumbs of information she was determined to use against him.

“Your Mark,” he said, face buried against the inside of her thigh as though he might bite her there. “It is gone, but it left a channel. There is an empty space inside you for the Fade to flow through. I follow the Veil to the place where it ends.” That was why she would not survive the fall of the Veil. But she knew that much already. 

He looked up her body to see her lips quirk up. She liked that phrasing. She was the place where it ended. 

* * *

She tried falling asleep holding weapons. A dagger, a vial of Antivan fire. He made them disappear. 

“Couldn’t I just summon a new dagger by thinking about it hard enough?” she asked him. She had seen him do similar things. He has imagined cushions, bottles of wine. A bed, once, to bend her over, when she fell asleep in a ruined shine to Andruil. 

In her dream of a richly-decorated chamber and a wrought-iron Tevene bed, the Inquisitor was astride him, her stomach flecked with sweat. He thought she was in Minrathous, which was suffering a lengthy heat wave. She didn’t like the heat because it made her cheeks redden and her long hair curl into snarls. He remembered that from their trip to the Western Approach: watching her yank a comb through her hair as she knelt before the campfire. After a week of it, she asked the Seeker to cut her hair for her. Solas had not thought it was his place to protest. 

In the Fade, it still spilled over her shoulders. Because that was her truth. 

“You do not _think_ of the dagger. You believe in the dagger,” he said, a little out of breath. She had been twisting her hips around him slowly--just a touch too slowly for either of them to reach their climax, but fast enough to keep him painfully hard and his balls tight against his body. He was thinking of flipping them over, soon she would believe it. 

The Inquisitor’s eyes narrowed, and after a few seconds, a slim, nearly red-hot blade formed in her left hand. He caused it to vanish before it was fully manifested but not before it scorched her palm. The way her body contracted around him from the pain of it was almost enough to tip him over the edge. 

“You would need to be faster than me,” he pointed out, annoyed. “And you are not.” 

Her heavy-lidded look of contemplation told him that she was willing to test that statement. Searching her for weapons when he found her would no longer be sufficient. 

She leaned forward over his chest to brush her breasts against his face. He sucked a nipple between his lips and worried it between his teeth as her hips ground down faster against him. Her hair fell around his scalp like a silken veil. 

It was uncommonly gentle of her to make him come with a slick roll of her body against his. Especially since he could tell that her mind was too intent on the mystery of the Fade to capture satisfaction of her own. 

But when his heartbeat slowed and he began to soften inside her, she braced her hands on his biceps and pushed against them.

“It does not have to be a weapon,” she said. “I could tie you up.” 

He huffed in amusement. “Did you not listen to any of the stories about me?” he asked, incredulous. “I am even more practiced at escaping traps than evading daggers.” 

His spend was leaking out between their bodies. Any moment now, he’d flip her over. Bring her off with his fingers between her thighs, as long as she didn’t try to kill him again while he was still coming down from the warm fog of his own orgasm.

The Inquisitor’s eyes narrowed. He felt bonds wrap around his arms and pull them over his head. He could make them vanish with a thought, but he wanted to see what she would do. 

The Inquisitor raised herself on her knees to let his cock slip out of her, but she crawled up his body as the bindings curled deeper around his arms and wrists.

“You said that you follow the Veil to the place where it ends,” she pointed out. “It is your magic, isn’t it? It is tied to your life.” 

She’d always been quick for a Dalish First. He nodded as she pinned his upper arms against the bed with her knees. 

“I am the trap you will not escape, Fen’Harel,” she said. “You are not even trying.” 

She rubbed her wet cunt against his face to prove her point. He pulled himself free from the insubstantial bonds she’d wrapped around him, but he buried his face between her thighs to lick her clean anyway. 

* * *

She won’t suck his cock. In light of those sharp, white teeth of hers, he would never feel totally safe fucking her mouth, but she never made the offer. It would be incongruent with her favorite game to play, where she pretends that she will take her pleasure of him and then not let him come. 

She likes to pretend that her dream is going to end after he kneels before her and slides her clothing away from her pale thighs After he teases his breath across her core and his mouth against the seam of her lips. After he licks her open and exposed and needy. After he sucks at her intimate and secret flesh until she begs for release. 

It never ends then. He is Fen’Harel. The dream will end when he wants it to end. 

He always comes. 

Sometimes he comes buried in her cunt with her body tense and fragile beneath him, her hair gripped in one of his fists. Sometimes he comes across her small, pointed tits while she snarls up at him and tells him that he’s a monster. Sometimes he comes with his face buried in her neck, when her limbs are slack and already sweet with her own release, and if he limits his knowledge of her to what he can smell and taste and hear in that single moment, he can imagine that they _are_ in love, and she wants him for reasons that he can accept. That is when the dream ends. 

* * *

On one spring evening, Solas found the Inquisitor reclining on a pile of grain sacks printed with the mark of a Wycome mercantile exchange. Perhaps she’d gone home to see her clan. Perhaps she’d been embraced and petted and celebrated. 

He pinned her to the bed with his hands in her hair. 

“You blew up my arms depot in Hasmal,” he murmured into her ear as his fingers tightened until they scraped her scalp. “There were three people inside.” 

She covered her momentary alarm at his precipitous arrival with her typical mask of gentle disdain.

“People?” she asked sweetly. “What kind of people? _My_ people? Or the real ones that you care about?”

He snarled at her. One had been Dalish, an old man whose entire family had been lost to Tevinter slavers. “ _My_ people are calling for your head.” 

He let his weight fall painfully over her legs. Some of his agents did not report directly up to him. They had their own agendas. They would likely attempt to assassinate her regardless of what orders he gave. Her blockade of Rialto had caused widespread famine; people who might have lived this last year of relative peace in comfort had suffered, some who might have survived into the new world had died. She too might be remembered as a hero by fewer people than she thought. 

“If you want my head, you shouldn’t have stopped with my hand,” she told him, fingernail coasting down the centerline of his chest. “What did you do with it, Fen’Harel? Did you eat it like the wolf from the story who swallowed the sun and the moon?”

He caught her hand in his fist and squeezed it until he could feel the small bones in it shifting. In her dreams, she did not bear the Anchor; she presented herself as though no part of him had ever touched her. In her dreams, her hand was whole, although he knew that awake she wore her sleeve pinned up and refused any prosthesis. 

“Inquisitor, I _am_ the wolf from the story,” he told her. He seized the moment of fear that contracted her pupils and stuttered her breath. He rolled in it like a scent he could disguise himself with. “You ought to be more careful. The time that you and the Inquisition have is on sufferance. A gift. Do not make me retract it.” The entire length of his body pinned her down. She could not move until he did. 

But the Inquisitor shifted sinuously against him. “I do not believe there is any part of me you have not yet taken,” she told him, and he was afraid that she believed that, when he knew that she had so much farther yet to fall. He sucked a purple bruise into the side of her neck and regretted that it would be gone when she woke up. 

The next week, he leveled half of Qarinus. The Inquisition should not have allied with the Imperial Chantry; all those candles ensured that it burned for days. 

* * *

On one evening of their last summer of life, the Inquisitor waded into a different pool of water, her clothes folded neatly at the shore. Solas might have accused her of sentimentality, although that was his own besetting sin, not hers. Her control of the Fade was as weak as any non-Dreamer’s; she could not choose her dream. He took her as he found her; she came as she was. 

Rather than join her in the water again, Solas paused beneath the shadows of the two great harts that flanked the entrance to the hidden grotto. 

There were times that he thought he knew where she was from the clues in her dreams. Few times that he knew _exactly_ where she was. This was the first time that he was nearby, or as close to nearby as a step through one mirror could take him. 

She had not yet seen him. In her dream, she floated on her back, gazing up at the stars through the verdant wind of the Fade. 

It could be a more distant memory, but the little details were wrong: one tree had only fallen in the past spring’s storms, and the grass was tall and green with the summer’s seed. She was choosing the setting the only way she knew how, by being there. 

There was a mirror attached to his main network no more than fifty paces from where she swam. If she was there, she was making a point. She knew it was there. She had either cracked his network of Eluvians or found the one. 

Someone would have to go and find out which it was, and, in any event, secure the mirror. 

Someone would have to go, and the Inquisitor was there alone by the terminus. 

Solas might be a fool but he was no idiot. He sent spirits to scour the nearby woods in both the world that woke and the world that dreamed. He located the Inquisition outpost nearly two hours away from where the Inquisitor waited for him. Nobody was near enough to either aid the Inquisitor or hinder Solas. She knew that he would not kill her directly. She wanted to test what else he would do for her, what he might trade to maintain exclusive use of the eluvians, he decided. 

Favors, probably. Information, certainly. His personal attention to the matter--he imagined that was what was keeping her up when he appeared the next night, half an hour before midnight. 

The Inquisitor was waiting for him without expecting him when he dropped the wards that concealed his approach. Dalish Firsts did not learn how to sit idly while they waited: she had bundles of elfroot and spindleweed sorted and drying, even though she had to use her teeth to tie off the bundles. At the sound of his footsteps, she put the last bundle down and sat back on her heels to look at him.

She had known Solas and then she had known Fen’Harel. He was there to negotiate his mirrors away from her, so he could have gone in golden armor and wolf fur. Wearing linen and bone was a strategic choice. It set her back for a moment, and he needed that moment to recover from seeing her again in the waking world, with her hair cut off at her jaw to frame her bare face. 

“I did not expect you so soon,” she remarked in lieu of greetings. “I only got here yesterday.” 

He turned over that statement to examine it for lies. “And yet you are not asleep at this hour?” 

Solas stalked to the blanket she sat on. It smelled like the halla fur it was woven from and also like the Inquisitor’s floral perfume. He remembered the day she had traded for it in the Exalted Plains. 

The Inquisitor’s face was unperturbed. “I do not sleep well these days. I have nightmares about a giant wolf that wants to destroy the world.” 

He laughed without amusement and sat down next to her, shifting the bundles of herbs out of the way. 

She had a couple of new lines at the corners of her eyes from squinting at the sun. She’d never have time to get old, but she no longer looked too young to be fighting for her life. 

“So,” Solas told her, sighing, “you must want to talk about my mirrors.”

“Yes,” she agreed, looking tired. “I suppose I must.” But she did not press the issue.

She had a small pile of supplies laid out at the corner of the blanket: a bottle of wine, a pile of travel bread, a sack of dried fruit. She reached for the wine bottle with her remaining hand. She uncorked it with her teeth, spitting it off to the side. Then she took a long drink directly out of the bottle and put it down between her knees. Her throat moved as she swallowed. 

She wore a short, Dalish tunic in stiff, waxed canvas that left her long legs bare. It had to be easy for her to put on and take off with her one hand. No more robes with complicated ties and buttons such as he had undone in the Fade. 

The Inquisitor’s lips flexed with unhappiness as she looked at the cave that led to the eluvian. 

Solas had to assume that she had called for her forces the second that he arrived. He had also closed the mirror from the other side before approaching, but they still had some time. 

He prized the bottle of wine out of her resistant fingers and put it to his own lips. 

She frowned at him as he took a swig from her bottle and gave it back to her. 

She was beautiful in a different way than she appeared in the Fade. She didn’t know about the new freckle on the top of her cheekbone. She’d forgotten about a notch in her earlobe that had been carved by a stray arrow; Solas remembered her joking that she would ask Josephine to pierce her ears when they got back to Skyhold. And of course he can see the entirety of her delicate features without the stretch of her vallaslin across them. He supposed that she had avoided looking in mirrors for the past five years. 

_You are so beautiful,_ he thought again, but he didn’t speak it out loud, because she thought he was a liar. He reached for her instead. 

He tasted the wine on her lips when he kissed the corner of her mouth, the vintage sweet and fragrant. Her limbs were pliant as he stripped her clothing from her. He scoffed at the single dagger she wore strapped to her thigh. 

“This is barely an effort, Inquisitor,” he told her as he tossed it away into the grass. 

“My forces are nearby,” she said, stretching languidly as he traced fingers down the satin skin of her belly and between her thighs. He curled one inside her to make her arch her back. “There is a strong possibility that someone will put an arrow in your back as you leave.”

“Live in hope,” he said, letting his mouth trace down her throat. 

She was unexpectedly gentle with him when he pressed her down on the blanket. She did not rake him with her nails or bite into his shoulder when he pulled his knit shirt over his head and knelt between her thighs. She grabbed for the wine bottle as he nibbled his way down over her ribcage and drank from it again, some of it spilling over her chin when he sucked at a sensitive spot in the crease of her thigh. He retrieved it and drained the rest of the bottle as he gazed at her spread legs. 

He had intended to put his mouth on her, but she reached up for him with her remaining arm, and falling into her embrace seemed like a more pressing need. 

Some things were easier for him in the Fade, but touching her in reality was more compelling for the imperfections of it. The hum of insects in the grass around them, the prickle of her pubic hair as he notched his cock against her entrance. Her fingertips clenched on his arm when he slid forward an inch, and he abruptly recalled that for all the times and ways he’d had her in the Fade, this might be the only time that any man had ever been inside her in the world that wakes. 

So he forced himself into gentleness too, even if he was not particularly practiced at it. He had perhaps half an hour within a single night to feel her heart beating inside her chest because their bodies were pressed together. That amount of time, and no more, to taste the salt on her skin and the bitterness of her perfume. 

She locked her legs around his back, and her heels dug into his muscles. It ought to hurt him too, he thought. She ought to carve him with her nails and spit in his mouth and call him a monster again. 

Solas wished she would, even as he shuddered with release, buried deep inside her accepting body. He held the position for a moment. His mouth was open from the effort of holding himself back from the tempo he’d trained himself to crave, and she shocked him by leaning up to brush her mouth across his lower lip. 

She had never kissed him before. Not since she’d taken to addressing him as Fen’Harel, anyway. If he kissed her, he did it at his own peril. 

Solas rolled off of her, wincing on her behalf at the sensenstion of their bodies separating. He brushed an apologetic hand down the line of her thigh. 

“Are you alright?” he asked, but the Inquisitor only nodded fractionally, her expression distant and dreamy. He relaxed a little. 

Solas rolled to his back, calculating how many of his minutes he had just used up. He needed to put his clothes back on, even if she seemed disinclined to move. 

He reluctantly pulled his trousers over his hips and then ran out of initiative. He sprawled out next to her, considering the expanse of her naked body in the moonlight. He had not left any new bruises, just his semen on her thighs. He dragged his thoughts back to his purpose there. 

“The mirrors, Inquisitor,” he said, voice rougher than he’d intended. “Tell me what you want for them, and then I will either let you have your peaceful night’s sleep or make you scream with my face between your thighs, your option.” 

She slowly turned her head to face him, blinking her liquid eyes like drowning pools. 

“Please let me have this moment, Solas,” she whispered. 

Guilt swept down his spine. He forgot, sometimes, that within the enemy of Fen’Harel she’d made of herself were the bones of a Dalish girl who had thought that one day she’d get to go home and live a real life. 

“Of course,” he murmured. He had a few more minutes he could spare her. 

He kissed her again, thinking that just once, he might not feel her teeth when he did so. She let his tongue slip against hers, let his mouth rub the smooth velvet of her own. She was never sweet with him anymore. She never let him simply have his way because she didn’t trust a single thing that he wanted, even if it was just her body under his. 

He wrapped her closer to his chest and stroked his hands through the cropped strands of her hair. Her lips were soft--but also cool. They’d never been cool. She’d been a coal that could burn as well as warm, but she’d never been soft and unresisting. 

An instinctual burst of fear spiked through his veins. Solas lifted his head and peered down at her closed eyes, her peaceful expression. He pressed a finger to the place in her neck where her blood beat against the skin. Her pulse was weak and uneven. He snarled in growing horror even as a prickly numbness spread across his chin and down his arms. 

His gaze fell on the empty wine bottle next to them. He would never have drunk from a cup she offered him--but she knew him. She had not made the offer. She’d drunk first. 

She’d poisoned them both. 

Lassitude was sweeping through his limbs, but her head already lolled to the side. She’d drunk _first._

He staggered to his knees. She knew he possessed no healing abilities. An hourglass had been tipped over, and his endless life and her brief one were trickling out of the same glass, faster than he’d planned. 

“You almost won, Inquisitor,” he whispered through a throat that was closing up from panic. She’d gotten very, very close. 

Revulsion swelled in him as he reached for powers he preferred not to draw upon and ripped open a rift in the Veil. He picked up the slim, vacant form of his enemy with arms that were already growing heavy and painless. He used what was left of the Anchor to carry them once more bodily into the Fade, calling with his failing voice for his spirits to come to him. 

* * *

It was a near thing for him. A nearer thing for her. He slept for a week after he was healed. He heard from his agents that she slept for even longer after they dumped her on Magister Pavus’ doorstep, where she might expect to enjoy the tender care of her devoted followers in her convalescence. The poison she had used was a Tevinter one; Solas thought he knew where she’d procured it. 

He drafted written orders to pour the same into the punch bowl at the next meeting of the Tevinter resistance and wipe Houses Pavus and Tilani from the face of the earth. He had not yet delivered the orders. He was not ruled by his passions. He would send them if it still seemed like the right thing to do when his hands no longer shook with rage every time he thought of it. 

It had been very close to the end for both of them. She had almost won. She had almost been the place where they both ended. 

A month later, he thought his anger cooled enough to seek the Inquisitor’s dreams again. His agents had lost her trail after she left the ruins of Qarinus. None of them could track her through the woods, and she’d gone alone, no doubt off to plot other inventive methods of his demise. Meanwhile, he took Vyrantium and purged the Inquisition spies from his organization there. 

When Solas finally found her dreams again, she was back in the woods of the Free Marches. It was winter, and the birch tree drooped thin white branches over the silvered water of the forest pool. She sat on the bare ground, shredding the dead grass in her hands. She no longer pretended to be her former self. The long, dark hair was cut short and utilitarian; her face was bare; her hand was absent. She must have faced herself in a mirror. 

When the Inquisitor saw him, she did not smile or frown. She tipped her head back, baring the long column of her throat, and she waited. 

“So,” the Inquisitor said. “You lived.” 

He sneered at her. “Against your best efforts. Did you imagine otherwise?” 

She shrugged, looking down at the water. “There was a chance it would be fatal for you but not for me.” Her tone was cool, contemplative of lessons learned. She would try again a different way. 

He stalked across the snow to her, looming over her like the beast of Dalish legend. He wrapped a palm around her throat and forced her to meet his eyes. Her pupils contracted. He has never put his hands on her before except when he has been speared naked inside her. He let her feel the pinprick of his clawed gloves until he nearly broke the skin.

“Did you think to save yourself with mithridatism?” he hissed. She had very nearly died. She might have died when he brought her into the Fade. She would have died if no spirit of Hope had been willing to come to him and heal her, as lit with the opposite emotion as he had been. 

“No,” she replied, calmly as though he were not half an inch from strangling her. 

“Then what if your forces had not arrived soon enough with the antidote?” he spat into her face. Anyone else had been at least an hour away, and she had been mere moments from dying. 

“There is no antidote to that poison,” she told him. “And the healers assured me it could not be cured.” She shrugged, the movement bunching her skin under his gauntlet. “It seems they were wrong.” 

Dying had felt like slipping beneath the ice. He sometimes felt like he would never be warm again. Like there was a shard of frozen glass lodged deep in his chest where he’d never carve it out. 

“You did not even know if I would drink too,” he yelled into her face. 

She smiled at him, the expression not meeting her liquid brown eyes. “But I know you, Fen’Harel.” 

He snarled as he let go of her throat to begin tearing at her clothes. 

“How many days did I nearly steal from us both, _vhenan?_ ” she asked, the term mocking him. “A hundred? A year? You think it is not murder if you do it to save the People, and you die too. Well, I will save you from this. From killing me.” 

He did not listen to her, pulling her shirt open to expose her breasts. There was a new scar where they’d cracked her chest to restart her heart. She will die when the Veil falls, but it will not be because he has killed her. He will die when the Veil falls, but it will not be a suicide. In the time between that day and this one, he will lose himself in her body every night trying to understand how she thinks she can still win. 

“I will catch you one of these days,” she said when he pulled her trousers down over her hips, and her smile was too confident by far for a doomed creature of numbered days. “Do you know why, Solas? Because I want to win, and you want to lose. Every time you hope, deep down, that this is the time that I catch you and end your miserable existence. You have to win every time, and I only have to win _once_.” Her smile was brilliant like the sun, blinding in its pain. “You will give me an infinite number of chances to kill you, because you _love_ me.” It sounded like a bad joke when she said it. An obvious lie. 

“And they call me a liar,” he hissed, flipping her to her stomach in the dirt so that he did not have to see her gloating expression. They are not in love.

They could not do this to each other if they were in love. 

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to Beaubeau and Airwrecka for the beta and tagging assistance. 
> 
> I nearly posted this on anon. 
> 
> Kinkshame me @YTCShepard on Twitter and @ YoursTrulyCommanderShepard on Tumblr.


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